177: Paying for Someone to Blame
07 Jul 2016Ripping Blu-rays for Apple TV, stable ice cream, Hackintoshes, and Apple’s disdain for the Mac Mini.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up: Dave Nanian of SuperDuper fame on HDMI CEC
- Ripping Blu-rays for Apple TV:
- MakeMKV
- Subler
- Plex
- Infuse
- DS Video
- Don Melton's video-transcoding scripts
- The TV Database
- The Movie Database
- Follow-up on Marco's HDMI CEC woes
- Follow-up: Matt Bischoff on ice cream ingredients
- iCloud Drive vs. Dropbox for file syncing
- Scrivener Sync
- macOS Sierra and the case of the missing files
- Dropbox Infinite
- Hackintoshes still exist, apparently
- The poor Mac Mini
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show Neutral: Honda Accord SE
Sponsored by:
- Trunk Club: Premium clothing, great advice, zero work.
- Wunder Capital: Do well and do good.
- Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi, that works. Use code ATP for free overnight shipping.
Chapters
- John’s unwanted roommate
- Fancy TVs and ripping Blu-rays
- Ice cream or not? 🖼️
- Sponsor: Trunk Club
- iCloud Drive vs. sync complexity
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- Hackintoshes
- Sponsor: Wunder Capital
- Custom-built Macs
- Apple hates the Mac Mini
- Ending theme
- Post-show Neutral: Accord SE 🖼️
John’s unwanted roommate
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m actually fighting with a fly in my are you here Marco will hear the fly later
⏹️ ▶️ John By trying to track down and kill this fly. I’ll get it eventually I feel like I have to we have to take
⏹️ ▶️ John a break from the show for me to hunt it down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you want me to lend you an iPad to?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Forgotten about that. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John my god. That’s old-school. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John My goodness talk amongst yourselves for a moment. I will kill or shoo this fly out of the room needs to be done. Hang on
⏹️ ▶️ John This fly did not want to leave, did not want to die.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How did you convince it? Did you argue with it until it realized it was wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have killed it if I could have caught it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it wouldn’t land.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to get it to leave the room, so I was turning off the lights in this room and turning on bright lights elsewhere to try to lure it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want, we can start talking about destiny, it’ll leave immediately. Just bore it
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the room. No, flies love destiny.
Fancy TVs and ripping Blu-rays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a friend of the show, Dave Naney and wrote in and he has opinions about universal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remotes and things of that nature
⏹️ ▶️ John of super duper fame. Dave Naney.
⏹️ ▶️ John backup application that you should use or equivalent to make multiple backups of your stuff anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he does. He’s not talking about universal remotes. I’m sorry. He’s talking about CEC. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he has very often been the proponent of the spend
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of money to solve your electronics problem
⏹️ ▶️ John which is one possible solution. I’ve never been particularly a fan of it because
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I’m sure no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how, not because I don’t want to spend a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of money on things, I have a really expensive TV, but I feel like no matter how much money you spend,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will still never work right. And you’ll feel worse if you spent a lot more money. But anyway, he’s happy
⏹️ ▶️ John with his setup. He has Bang & Olufsen stuff, and he has a Bang & Olufsen TV, which itself
⏹️ ▶️ John acts as like the hub for everything. It’s like six HDMI inputs and built-in sound system
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can connect like 18 speakers to the TV, and it does wireless stuff, and it integrates
⏹️ ▶️ John with like home control systems you can raise and lower your blinds and turn on your lights and security cameras, like
⏹️ ▶️ John all the rich people stuff that you would imagine. And because the TV itself is the
⏹️ ▶️ John hub for all of this stuff, you don’t have a situation like Casey described last time of the universal
⏹️ ▶️ John remote having to track the state of all your devices and if it gets out of sync Then it’s very confused
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV knows the state of everything because it is the hub for everything and it can you know sense when it’s getting input on The different things
⏹️ ▶️ John and the speakers are hooked up directly to the television. So it takes out a lot of the guesswork And they have all these
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy-pants things where you can take all of your equipment That’s big and noisy and put it in the basement and connect it with a big
⏹️ ▶️ John ethernet cable up to your system upstairs You can hide all the stuff all the the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you would spend thousands of thousands of dollars for of course the downside of This is you have to at the
⏹️ ▶️ John very least have this big fancy bang and olsen TV and some other proprietary Components that go with it and
⏹️ ▶️ John bang and olsen doesn’t really make good TV. That’s this is a problem, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I the television that I have at the time that I bought it had I bought a fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John bang and olsen thing I would be getting a worse television set in terms of picture quality in exchange for all this other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff So I’m still stuck because of my priorities,
⏹️ ▶️ John buying individual components and slapping them together and trying to make do with it. But if you’re willing to compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John on not having the absolute very best of every individual component, you can buy an integrated solution
⏹️ ▶️ John for a tremendous amount of money that I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But you’ll be happy. And by the way, another solution I was asking a while back in Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John the best solution for we talked about this in the show for me to get the video off of my blu rays
⏹️ ▶️ John without recompressing it just preserve it exactly bit for bit the way it is on my blu rays and then play
⏹️ ▶️ John it back in my television without having a spinning plastic disc that’s make
⏹️ ▶️ John it yeah but remember i was my issue was playback i can’t get 24 uh frame 24 frames per second
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco playback boxes
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway we talked about that on a past show which none of us will be remember in the show notes but anyway um the
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the rich person solutions to that is those boxes they sell that I think is technically legal because someone
⏹️ ▶️ John paid a lot of money to the Blu-ray Association where you buy the super expensive box
⏹️ ▶️ John and you feed it either all your blu-rays in a big jukebox or one at a time and it basically rips your blu-rays
⏹️ ▶️ John for you losslessly and lets you play them back but it does it in a way that like complies with
⏹️ ▶️ John the letter of the law I don’t know whatever it’s not a pirate saying it’s entirely legal thing, but it’s tremendously
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. And it’s just it’s like outside the amount of money I’m willing to pay for that. I will just stick the disc
⏹️ ▶️ John in a DVD and the Blu-ray player and deal with the spinning disc noise at this point. But hopefully we’ll get there
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually. We’re close. Like I said, we’re really close. The only barrier remaining is me not having
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to play that content back on my television, preserving the correct frame rate and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John without doing a spinning disc.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should point out that I have achieved 80% of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also would have the same problem with 24 frames a second but I don’t care because I don’t think I have anything of that rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I usually watch TV shows but I ripped the entire wire blu-ray set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was very very easy with modern tools because all I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to do was use make MKV to rip the blu-ray and then Subler to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically rewrap it in an mp4 container without having to transcode the video. Although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe I had to transcode the audio because I don’t care about surround sound. Please email John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modified it already. Yeah, well, who cares? But that’s optional. You could have left the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant AC3 and DTS tracks on there if you really wanted to. But I don’t even have surround speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore because I decided years ago they weren’t worth the hassle. So anyway, I was able to rip the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV series with Subler and MakeMKB in surprisingly little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And just like this roughly $100 USB3 Blu-ray drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had in the closet from a little while back. And yeah, it works great. And now I play them in Plex,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it has all the metadata from Plex somehow, magically, through some probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not quite legal service, and it’s great. I absolutely love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s way faster and more reliable and way better quality than the HBO Go, Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini, App, whatever it is, the HBO Mini app on TV, it’s way better than that, way better quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no dropping frames issues, so it wasn’t a problem with the bit rate or anything, it was a problem with HBO sucking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, overall, a great solution to watch any kind of HBO show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s buy the Blu-rays and rip them all, it actually works surprisingly well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s what I do with the content I don’t actually care about. Once I care about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I need it to be the highest possible quality. So yeah, I have tons of stuff in Plex, I have tons of things that are, you know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for the things I care about, I want the very best quality, and that’s still putting the disc in the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But wait a minute though, so the only limitation of what I was just saying is possibly audio, does, if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV can output whatever DTS or whatever over the optical port, then you wouldn’t have any quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems, right? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John an optical port, you can do it over HDMI if it’s smart enough. A lot of the applications won’t send
⏹️ ▶️ John the unmodified audio, like they won’t send the DTS HD stream directly
⏹️ ▶️ John to my receiver, they just won’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet Plex would, or there’s probably an
⏹️ ▶️ John Plex and Infuse, depends on which one is in the best mood, or like the DS Video app, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John many options to do it. But really, it’s the video, because most of the content I really care about, I’m mostly talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about movies, and they’re 24 frames per second, and it’s a deal breaker. I can’t get that to my TV any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. And that’s mainly a hardware issue, right? That you don’t have any TV boxes that run software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could play movies and would output the right signal?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not hardware, it’s software. Like Apple TV could be changed in such a way to output 24 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per second cadence video. My PlayStation 3 can output that. That’s what I put the Blu-ray into, right? I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John even tried putting the video files on the PlayStation 3 and having it do it, but I can’t get that to work either.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the only time my PlayStation 3 outputs in this way is when it’s playing a Blu-ray. The Apple TV is always
⏹️ ▶️ John locked at 60 frames per second or whatever it’s outputting at, and I just try and, we went through this in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco past show. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I have nothing that can do it, and there’s no technical reason. It’s not like these things aren’t powerful enough or whatever. A lot of people have newer televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John than mine that can do the, what do you call it, detecting the cadence and accounting
⏹️ ▶️ John for it and everything, but I run all the video tests, and it just, nothing can get 24 frames per second out there except for
⏹️ ▶️ John my Blu-ray player. So that’s what I keep using. My next setup, hopefully we’ll be able to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If not, it’s not the end of the world. Blu-ray players. It’s not a thing I do frequently, and it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John for a small subset of movies, so I’ll just keep sticking the discs in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although, my solution doesn’t have fan noise, either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you’re missing out on the things that John’s eyeballs can’t even see,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and he’ll know that he’s missing out on it. I can see them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a couple of thoughts, mostly on what Marco had said. I’d like to completely agree with him about Make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MKV. It is wonderful, especially as paired with, if you’re willing to recompress
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don Melton’s compression scripts, which we’ve talked about in the past, and I believe I’ve written a post about at some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point or another. If I have, I’ll put it in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, those are awesome. But nowadays, I mean, recompressing Blueberry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still, even on modern hardware, still a very computer-intensive, pretty long-running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process. And you can just run them in a batch overnight, but it still takes a lot. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have any way to use three and a half inch hard drives as your storage medium,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, whether that’s external drives in your desk or a NAS in the closet full of disks, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, 3 1⁄2 inch hard drives are so massive and cheap these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you just have basically infinite storage space if you can use those drives somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I just, these days, I ripped them all from Blu-rays and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole Wire series is 560 gigs from Sublare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t matter at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Most feature films are 30 or 40 gigs, I think, something like that, and The Wire is considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey longer than that. And to go back one more step, you were talking—and I know you said it jokingly about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, some illegal way that Plex gets the metadata. I don’t believe it’s legal at all. They don’t use IMDb,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I presume is for some sort of licensing reason or something, but they do use the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey database, which is the tvdb.com, and the movie database, which is the moviedb.org, and we’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those links in the show notes. Those are less geared around browsing, in my opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who did what and when, and more about getting metadata about films, which is probably why Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses it. But they are, to the best of my knowledge, completely legal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What about all the copyrighted material on them? Is it one of those weird gray areas?
⏹️ ▶️ John You mean like the Google image search for movie posters? They just shove them in there? Probably not really.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s true,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually. I didn’t think about that. I don’t know. But anyway, anything else on video and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of thing? We have one other piece of follow-up real quick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I do have a quick bit of follow up on my HDMI CEC situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The setting was off.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a case. Casey debugged your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You’re right. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hadn’t. I didn’t even know you could turn it off, so I hadn’t checked it and it was on, but like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked for months. Somehow it turned off. It’s pretty deep in the settings. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have accidentally done that since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never go to the setting screen, but I don’t know maybe maybe one of the software updates might have turned it
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the features of CEC is that can it can turn off CEC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goodness gracious.
Ice cream or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the last piece of follow-up we have from a friend of the show, Matt Bischoff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John I think especially was talking last episode about what ingredients are in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what ice creams and you know, hey, in John’s opinion, if I recall correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said there should only be a handful of ingredients in any true and decent ice cream. And Matt Bischoff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has done a survey of many of the popular ice cream brands that we’ve mentioned and even a couple of others
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and put together an air table, which is a site I’ve never heard of before, but it’s very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It looks like basically a Google sheet or Excel spreadsheet if you will, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit more than that And so you can see all the different ingredients Matt has included the ingredients
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ingredient count calorie per serving Serving size calories per gram and even links because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he is that thorough Is there anything that guy doesn’t do pretty much perfectly? I doubt it but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth checking out John now that you’ve seen this any opinions on any of this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John a Lot of people wanted to write in and tell me why all those ingredients are in there I know why they’re in there. Unfortunately, the list
⏹️ ▶️ John of ingredients doesn’t tell you what I really want to know, which I should have emphasized last time is how much of this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John things that we’re talking about that are not things that you would put in ice cream that you make in your own house with your ice cream maker, which, by the way, is
⏹️ ▶️ John really easy and everyone should do. It doesn’t even take up a lot of room. You should get one. They’re fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is they’re putting in ingredients to make it so that when the ice cream thaws and
⏹️ ▶️ John then refreezes, you don’t get those big, chunky ice crystals. You ever do that if you’re with any body
⏹️ ▶️ John from the star or whatever, like it thaws a little bit, and like, or if you’re a refrigerator or a freezer, like say your kid
⏹️ ▶️ John leaves the door open or something, or the power goes out for a long time and everything kind of like melts a little bit, but then it refreezes,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you take the ice cream, like, oh, you can tell that it’s melted and refrozen. And someone can
⏹️ ▶️ John find a physics video on YouTube explaining how like the ice crystals, like the water separates from the non-molder parts and
⏹️ ▶️ John then it forms larger ice crystals and it tastes all crunchy and gross, and you don’t like that, it’s bad. Egg yolk
⏹️ ▶️ John is one example of like an emulsifier, essentially that will keep the things mixed together,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like how egg yolk in a salad dressing will keep the oil and the vinegar mixed together. It will keep them from separating. Same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, it’ll keep the liquid, the water from separating from the solid ingredients and making the big ice crystals when it remelts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Egg yolks are more expensive, obviously. Almost all the other things they put in, these various gums and other, what they
⏹️ ▶️ John call stabilizers, they’re called stabilizers because they want to account for the fact that the ice cream is gonna be shipped from far away
⏹️ ▶️ John in trucks with imperfect refrigeration, and it’s going to melt and refreeze and melt and refreeze melt and refreeze and
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have these stabilizers in them that it would taste terribly it would just be like you know big
⏹️ ▶️ John chunky water sharp ice crystals in there doesn’t taste good you want it to be smooth and creamy
⏹️ ▶️ John so the cheaper ice creams in addition to this thing what is it called overrun I forget what the hell it’s called how much
⏹️ ▶️ John air they blow into it to make you buy air instead of densely packed things that’s why Haagen-Dazs is more dense
⏹️ ▶️ John than regular stuff but anyway setting aside the air thing because some people just like a a softer ice cream.
⏹️ ▶️ John The cheaper the ice cream, the more stabilizer they put in it. And they put lots and lots of stabilizers so it can be very resilient
⏹️ ▶️ John to freezing and thawing. And they don’t have to put any egg yolks or any other more expensive ingredient in
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And it still, you know, seems smooth and creamy no matter where you get it. So it’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ John that there are stabilizers, it’s how much. And the ingredient list doesn’t tell you how much because they don’t have amounts. It’s just an order by,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the most, uh, the ingredients that there’s the most of and then the second most and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t give you numbers. And my impression of the really the worst ice cream flavors is they have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of stabilizers and a lot of other things that affect texture and stuff and that there’s more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John That you know I would like Hagen-Dazs a couple of their flavors have some stabilizers in them but not a lot in is
⏹️ ▶️ John my impression. And then other ones that have the exact same ingredient list tastes like I’m eating I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know foam rubber or something. It just doesn’t taste right or taste natural. So that’s and
⏹️ ▶️ John this this list going down to cold stone cream, you’re having 17 ingredients, including like, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John ethyl alcohol and artificial flavor, whatever that is, and try ethyl citrate
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, all sorts of other things to, uh, uh, affect the color,
⏹️ ▶️ John the flavor, uh, and then to avoid all those ice crystals and everything. And what I heard from somebody was that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it was Twitter or someone emailing me or something about hog and us, for example, how can they get away with not having stabilizers?
⏹️ ▶️ John And for example, there were no ice cream. How can they do that? Because apparently they own their their distribution chain
⏹️ ▶️ John and their own their own refrigerated trucks. And they basically make sure that their ice cream never never melts and refuses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you were to melt and refreeze hog and I’ve done it, we had power outages and stuff. It tastes terrible. It’s got all
⏹️ ▶️ John the ice crystals formed. No stabilizers except for egg yolks, which are expensive, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, try making your own ice cream. Try avoiding the ice creams not that have any stabilizers
⏹️ ▶️ John in them, but that basically tastes like you’re eating a big thing of plastic and you’ll be happier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, just try avoiding the ones whose ingredients sound like jet fuel is basically a good rule here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, a quick follow-up. A handful of people wrote me to say, oh, I didn’t know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dryers or bryers was EDs where you are and so on and so forth. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently I got myself very mixed up about what’s EDs versus dryers versus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bryers. And so I had commented that the Slow Churned, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I had attributed to dryers, the Slow Churned, which is the low-fat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ice cream, is actually my favorite by taste ice cream, which I know John really, really hates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And somebody wrote not only me, but Edie’s Ice Cream on Twitter to say, you know, hey, what’s the story? I thought that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was Edie’s. And it is Edie’s where I am. I had been confused.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Edie’s Ice Cream has written, Edie’s is called dryers west of the Rocky Mountains.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just FYI. It’s delicious no matter what you call it. I think so. Thank you Edie’s Social media team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for correcting my unbelievable faux pas.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of my least favorite brands of ice cream Edie’s Yeah, I should recognize the container was that it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John dryer. It’s just a different word on it It’s kind of like the the Hellman’s and Best Foods mayonnaise situation
⏹️ ▶️ John one flavor of Edie’s though There’s a flavor this ties into last week that I don’t think is available anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John else that I think taste pretty terrible and does not taste like it tastes very artificial to
⏹️ ▶️ John me and yet I still find myself eating it which is probably bad is that they make a flavor that has
⏹️ ▶️ John basically Samoas mixed into the ice cream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh I tried that it’s it I found it overwhelmingly like artificial and weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John oh yeah totally it
⏹️ ▶️ John totally it totally tastes like you’re eating like puffy plastic with Samoas in it
⏹️ ▶️ John yes and yet I still find myself eating it so that’s like I mean I don’t I would never buy it willingly but sometimes it appears
⏹️ ▶️ John in the house and it does appear in the house. I usually won’t touch Edie’s at all, but that one I will take some. I always feel bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always stop myself after a little tiny bit and put it back. But yeah, I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the draw of the Samoas, I guess. But I’m repulsed by the ice cream, but drawn by the broken up cookies.
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iCloud Drive vs. sync complexity
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have done a terrible job with my duties as chief summarizer and chief and I have not done my homework. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pulled a Marco and I apologize to everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Welcome, it’s nice over here, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was very relaxing, I will admit. So apparently something has happened with iCloud versus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dropbox for Scrivener, is that how you pronounce it? Scrivener syncing? And I don’t know which one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you put this in the show notes but I will kick it over to you to take over my duties and the mantle of- Can you guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I figured it was you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but- I also didn’t hear about this, so this is gonna be a short segment, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wee! All right, John, tell us about Scrivener, if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Semi-old news, and I brought it up to the top because it ties into our past discussions about APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John and the cloning of entire directory hierarchies without having to go down and copy each individual
⏹️ ▶️ John file just to clone a whole tree of the file system in a copy-and-write manner, which is good for Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John file formats that are actually folders full of files. Also, Scrivener is a word processing
⏹️ ▶️ John application for like, I think it’s designed mostly for writing like books. You can have like notes and your outlines
⏹️ ▶️ John and plot summary and character information all tied together with your manuscript of the book that you’re writing and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it uses a file format that’s also a directory full of files. So you can have all these different things. It’s basically like a big project
⏹️ ▶️ John format, right? And they have a syncing system and they
⏹️ ▶️ John were going to use iCloud apparently, but we’re not able to because it doesn’t provide the features they need to
⏹️ ▶️ John sync their directory full of files things. They’re, you know, they’re trying to be nice. As much as
⏹️ ▶️ John we love iCloud, this is from this webpage, we’ll link in the show notes, from the Scrivener people themselves, current limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John and difficulties with iCloud mean it’s not great at present. Not at present suited for the sort of complex
⏹️ ▶️ John package-based file format used by Scrivener. And you would think it would be totally suited for that because Apple has those file formats too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, the next operating system is sort of the genesis of those file formats the popularization of them
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. But no. Dropbox, on the other hand, which is what they do use for their sync
⏹️ ▶️ John solution, gives them the control they need. And one of their big complaints about iCloud is they don’t know when things will sync.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as if they can initiate a sync and get notified when it’s done. Things just magically appear behind the scenes
⏹️ ▶️ John in sort of a background manner. And that can leave this file format, this folder full
⏹️ ▶️ John of files, in an unknown and inconsistent state. And so what they say in this
⏹️ ▶️ John blog post about these technical limitations is they’d rather have users complaining they don’t like manually syncing
⏹️ ▶️ John than just lost four hours of writing because of structural changes. Like you could end up with a document like if you sync and
⏹️ ▶️ John you think you’re done and you close the lid on your laptop but didn’t really finish you’ve got like a half-finished document there and that’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John and Dropbox apparently gives them the control to sync the whole thing on demand let them know when it’s done and either have
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing entirely synced or entirely in the previous state. It’s clear with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John new file system that they will have at least on the local side the ability to do these operations
⏹️ ▶️ John atomically but their iCloud APIs with the sort of magic oh you don’t need to know
⏹️ ▶️ John the details just there’s a folder there and eventually the documents you want will appear everywhere and in the
⏹️ ▶️ John meantime there’s like proxy documents that you can get metadata about and so on so it doesn’t work when what you care
⏹️ ▶️ John about is not an individual file but an entire directory full of files because apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John the you know the iCloud drive and sync people weren’t on the same page with
⏹️ ▶️ John the people writing dot RTF D files and text editor maybe it doesn’t matter when you’ve got a half finished dot RTF D
⏹️ ▶️ John file may assume it will sink in the rest of the way anyway this is yet another sad story of a developer who desperately
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to use iCloud eventually having to go to a different solution very often developers roll their own
⏹️ ▶️ John solutions or they go a dropbox or they go with something else it’s sort of the the ongoing failure of
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud to fulfill the even the most basic needs of some of the best
⏹️ ▶️ John developers of Mac applications or iOS applications for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that matter. Data syncing is hard in general and I think what we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see is iCloud Drive, you know, it’s another one of these examples where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when iCloud interacts with the file system it’s not always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. It seems like CloudKit and what they’ve made with CloudKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is able to be really great. With certain apps, with certain things that go well, it’s able to be really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But whenever iCloud interacts with files on disk that have to exist in a file system and be interacted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with in other ways as well, that seems like it’s not even there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worry about that a little bit, but we have other solutions for that. We have Dropbox. We have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, Dropbox. It seems to work well for most people, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess it’s okay now. I guess it’s okay in the grand scheme of things, but it is kind of sad that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still not really playing well in that game.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, on an individual file basis, they have most of this. But the whole idea is the difference between an API where you say,
⏹️ ▶️ John please do sync now, like even a synchronous API where you say, make this call.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when the call returns, the thing I asked to be done is done. That can work on an individual file basis. And Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Kit is much more like that in that you have the control over that. I’m not sure if they’re complaining about Cloud Kit specifically or iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive that does it like magically behind their back. All of that is on a single individual file.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no sort of like, oh, this entire tree of files. I want you to sync all of that and tell me when
⏹️ ▶️ John all of that is done unless you’re going to try to do each individual one. And then what about files that have been added or removed?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no there’s no API for to do things at that level. And the related thing that came up today.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is about the Sierra beta. Maybe I shouldn’t say who’s reporting this because I don’t know what you’re supposed to say
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Sierra beta. Is it a public beta? I don’t know. I don’t even know the rules anymore. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John from the keynote that Mac OS Sierra has this feature where it will automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John sync your desktop. Remember that? Like all the stuff on your desktop between your Macs and also apparently your documents
⏹️ ▶️ John folder. I forget what it is. When I installed it, it was like a checkbox or something. It says, hey, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to sync all this stuff in your documents folder and desktop? And I was like, hell no. For
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the reasons discussed in the past, like please don’t. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so someone we all know, check that checkbox just to see what it was like. And like, la-de-da, it’s like, especially if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have one computer, la-de-da, it’s syncing the stuff or whatever. And at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ John they said, all right, I wanna stop doing that. And like, uncheck the checkbox. And when you uncheck it, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know the phrasing they use, like when you go into the iCloud preference pane and uncheck like contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John or something or whatever, and it’s like, keep in mind that the whatevers will no longer be available
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You know that phrasing? It’s like their way,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t wanna say, going to delete your stuff, but they’re like, whatever you’re talking about will no longer be available
⏹️ ▶️ John on your Mac or some some already like that. And I don’t know if people really know what that means.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s kind of it’s accurate, but it means like your stuff go bye bye now like it’s not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John there anymore. We’re going to delete it and and this person who was checking this box is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is my documents holder. Surely they don’t mean they’ll remove everything in my documents folder
⏹️ ▶️ John if I uncheck this checkbox, So, this person unchecked it, and lo and behold, their documents,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in their documents folder went away. Like everything. And now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not really gone. Apparently, like, the system is squirreling it away in a different location. If you know where you can,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can, you know, find it, it’s still there, like, and you can make it come back because it’s synced and all that other stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is probably working, like, as designed. But A, this is a terrifying design, because I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John people expect it to happen. I think people mostly do keep everything that they care about on their desktop and in their documents folder,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they were to uncheck a checkbox, everything disappeared, even if they can get it back by rechecking the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the panic and the trust lost by that interaction is terrible. And then the other part
⏹️ ▶️ John of that is, if anything does go wrong, and you check the checkbox to try to get it back, and it gives you back like an old
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the file or something like it, which you know, could happen because sync is really hard, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be just insult on top of injury, it’ll be terrible. So I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope they reconsider this interface. And the whole idea that there’s a series of checkboxes that you can check the mixed
⏹️ ▶️ John up with like, one of the most important sort of user interface
⏹️ ▶️ John decisions that Dropbox made was that the files in Dropbox will
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about this more if we ever get to Dropbox is project infinite, which changes this decision. But the files in your Dropbox folder
⏹️ ▶️ John are just plain files on your Mac. If you turn Dropbox off, those files are still sitting on your Mac exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John where they were. If you never run Dropbox again, files are still just sitting there, right? They’re not…
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox doesn’t like control those files to the point where like, oh you quit Dropbox, your entire Dropbox folder is empty.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’re just files on your disk and when you turn Dropbox on, it looks at its Dropbox folder and syncs them
⏹️ ▶️ John all and does all this stuff or whatever, but when you turn it off or if Dropbox crashes in the middle, everything is just exactly the way it was
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re just real files on your disk. And yes, that means that if you have five computers all using Dropbox, you have five
⏹️ ▶️ John individual different copies of those same files. And And if you uninstall Dropbox from all of them, now
⏹️ ▶️ John all five computers have the same files on them, but they’re just plain files on disk. Same is true of iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive, but the policy of saying when you uncheck this checkbox, the only way we can deal with it is to remove
⏹️ ▶️ John these things from your documents folder from your desktop or to blank it out or put them into a different folder even,
⏹️ ▶️ John or do anything with them at all other than to leave them exactly where they are, is the wrong decision,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it works perfectly. So anyway, Sierra is a beta. I don’t know if this was an intended
⏹️ ▶️ John feature, a bug, anything, you know, plenty of asterisks and caveats
⏹️ ▶️ John on this. I’m not slamming it on a released operating system, but I really hope when this feature does exist that it has a better
⏹️ ▶️ John policy than that. And even if it doesn’t, I’m still not enabling it because I still find it really scary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of those problems where, you know, when you have like the folder full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of files that need to be synced, there are so many weird little uncomfortable edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases or areas where you need some kind of administrator tool. So for instance, any kind of merge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conflict or like what Dropbox does, which we learned about with our discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about file names, that apparently like Dropbox will create like a conflict if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have two different Unicode encodings of the same name. It will just leave them both there and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rename one or both of them like naming conflict or something like that, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a merge conflict in Dropbox, it keeps both or all three files and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just renames them with parentheses at the end like oh you know conflict version whatever whatever whatever whatever the format they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use and these are all kind of ugly solutions to real-world conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but these are the kind of these are the kind of like ugly results that you kind of can’t automate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this away in a way that will never lose data for people or that will that will always do exactly what people want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do but Apple tries to so Apple Apple seems like they’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of institutionally allergic to adding in these kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like administrative ugliness things that even when they have to be there like a case like it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a merge conflict on a file share thing like a Dropbox folder Apple’s solution is usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re just gonna guess and hope that we guess right through some kind of heuristics that will probably be right most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time and that will just deal with it like that’ll just be the way it’s dealt with then if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you lose data oh well like that seems to be their approach most of the time to these kind of like difficult sync problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t think that works very well in an environment where you have like people’s files in folders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have always worked a certain way, people are accustomed to the people expect and that people require for their data to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know there and reliable and intact and everything. Like Apple’s approach to just we’re just going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid giving you any kind of controls to manage the actual complexity of this problem. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works for files.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the advancements of CloudKit was that it would delegate to the application to make this decision to say cloud kit
⏹️ ▶️ John will let you know there’s a conflict and you’ll get this call back and it’s up to you what to do about it and you
⏹️ ▶️ John could decide in your application I’m just going to keep all three copies and rename them with parentheses right
⏹️ ▶️ John this this situation with the iCloud drive or whatever the syncing of the desktop stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is like I said it’s more of a policy decision of saying what should we do when they uncheck that box I think the right decision when they uncheck
⏹️ ▶️ John that box is to just leave everything exactly the way it is on disk and not mess with it anymore but the decision they’re making is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the same decision they make for contacts or all the other things that you can check
⏹️ ▶️ John and uncheck in the iCloud preference pane that they well sometimes in the iCloud preference they ask you should we remove
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones or leave them on your Mac they should ask the same thing for the documents again which makes me think maybe this isn’t an intentional feature they just haven’t gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John around to that to change that dialog box in that way but it just goes to show that there
⏹️ ▶️ John are lots of things that you can do to confuse and frighten the user and perhaps the worst one is making
⏹️ ▶️ John all their stuff apparently disappear even if it’s it’s all safely preserved both locally in a different folder that they renamed
⏹️ ▶️ John and on the cloud. That, that moment of trust, you know, you losing the user’s trust is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make them not want to use that product anymore. And Dropbox with the renaming with the garbage files and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John My experience is that happens to people and they don’t even notice until like a month later and like what is this whatever is
⏹️ ▶️ John conflicted copy file here. I don’t quite understand that. But the reason they didn’t notice is because
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t actually delete anything. always, you know, fails in a way that gives you
⏹️ ▶️ John extra data, extra garbage files of like, well, I’ve got the file that I expected, I’ve got two more that I didn’t expect, but you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John all three versions of the file. And if one of them is named differently, and you can’t figure it out, like you go there, and you sort by name,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll find there’s a bunch of other files with similar you’ll find your stuff like it won’t, as opposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to pick the correct file for you, or presenting some dialogue for
⏹️ ▶️ John you to choose how to resolve the conflict when you don’t have enough information to do that. So Dropbox solution
⏹️ ▶️ John is not great for a lot of situations where you don’t want to make a bunch of garbage files, but it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John choice for just sort of a generic bin full of, you know, folder full of files,
⏹️ ▶️ John without any specific purpose. Because it, you know, that their, their strategy is,
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst thing we can do is lose someone’s data. It’s much better to
⏹️ ▶️ John give them a bunch of garbage files than to make stuff disappear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why do you think that Google Drive and like OneDrive and to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box haven’t tried to be that like everything sync engine that dropbox has seemed to become
⏹️ ▶️ John they are trying they have different policies like i think google drive is very similar to
⏹️ ▶️ John dropbox i haven’t actually used one drive but all of them oh all these products including dropbox now
⏹️ ▶️ John with the project infinite thing are dancing around the other trade-off like dropbox’s thing of
⏹️ ▶️ John hey every single file is on your on your mac and we will sync it and then and then they added Selective Sync many years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can choose which files you want to sync. Dropbox Infinite is,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, we’ll make it look like the files, this is my understanding, I don’t actually use it, we’ll make it look like the files
⏹️ ▶️ John are on your Mac, but really they’ll be in the cloud, which makes a lot of sense in a pervasively network-connected office,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll let you pin, I’m assuming it will let you pin files to your Mac so they don’t go away. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can have basically more stuff in your Dropbox than will fit on your Mac, or like
⏹️ ▶️ John on-demand selective sync, sort of like you’re paging in the files from the cloud onto your Mac as you use them, and as
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t use them, they don’t need to be on your Mac. Or you could say, never bring this all the way on my Mac, just sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John access it over the network. It’s sort of a blending of NFS mounts and Dropbox complete
⏹️ ▶️ John copying of files and all that other stuff, and it does that with a kernel extension. There’s a whole article about it on
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox’s thing. It’s very interesting, but it’s a very different trade-off than Dropbox makes, and it’s much more dangerous because
⏹️ ▶️ John if they mess anything up there, bad things can happen. Like the reassurance of Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, is that you can quit the Dropbox app, never relaunch it again, and everything in that Dropbox folder is exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what you see is what’s there. None of those files are fake, none of them are proxy files. They’re all there, they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John taken up disk space on your Mac. You don’t have to wonder which ones are where.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, you can move things in and out of it. They’re not constrained in any way. They don’t have weird permissions
⏹️ ▶️ John on them. They’re just plain old files. And Project Infinite takes that away in exchange for you not having
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with selective sync and have you, you know, fill up your disk because someone in a shared folder
⏹️ ▶️ John puts a ton of stuff in there and all sorts of other downsides of the traditional Dropbox model. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a much higher degree of difficulty. And I think a lot of the other vendors went right for that higher degree of difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John and never sort of started off as simple as Dropbox. The advantage Dropbox has had, I think, is that, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, even before selective sync, it was a very simple user model that people could understand,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have a lot of features, so simple to be implemented by a bunch of Python scripts are crying out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think Dropbox built a lot of trust and goodwill with that simple
⏹️ ▶️ John model. And now they can expand like as they expand to selective sync that didn’t cause people to flee because it was too confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was just a tweak of the thing they understood. We’ll see a project infinite is a bridge too far. But I think that’s the big
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage that Dropbox had that I think big companies like Google and Microsoft can’t help but immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John implement all the complicated features.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you plan on trying Dropbox Infinite?
⏹️ ▶️ John I doubt it. I mean, I’m not dissatisfied with the plain Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a lot of disk space. I do use Selective Sync sometimes to keep things, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John from getting too big, because I do have some shared folders, and I really hate Dropbox’s policy of like shared folders count towards your quota,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is ridiculous because you know they’re only storing one copy of this stuff server side. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t, especially since it uses a kernel extension, but I will be curious about it so I won’t rule it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I don’t actually plan to try it honestly. I mean maybe if you know on a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might try it on my main computer I definitely wouldn’t. I’d rather just buy more hard drive space and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suck it up then run those risks and everything. But on a laptop maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I don’t have that much stuff in my Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well I have nine gigs available of which I’ve used a little over half of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s I mean there’s what, four gigs, a little more, maybe even five gigs in there. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that much, and even the smallest laptop can grab all of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still on a free Dropbox plan. I haven’t had a need to pay for it. I’m not opposed to paying for it. I just haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the need to pay for it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually just started paying for it at WWDC this year. Like, that’s my finally bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So what puts you over the edge? I wanted an easy way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly have a backup of the podcast files that we had recorded there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was just easier than setting up something else at that moment in the very brief time that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was sitting in the fast Ethernet area of Moscone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I thought, you know what? I kept hitting it because I only had the regular 2 gig limit plus a couple hundred megs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I kept running into that all the time with just transferring podcast files back and forth. I’m like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s about time. Let me actually finally pay for this product that I’ve been using and running my business on for literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, makes sense. And I also kind of like that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology has like CloudSync or something like that, which puts a copy of Dropbox on the Synology, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is neat as another backup. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Yeah, I think it’s called CloudSync. There’s one of the apps that you can install.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll have to get it get you the name after the show. One of the apps you can install basically acts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as another Dropbox client. And so if you wanted to, you could have an additional backup of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dropbox sitting on your Synology.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently Hackintoshes are still a thing, and Mike Rundle just built one. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s about the extent of my knowledge on this scenario. So John, tell us about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, don’t call it a comeback. People are always doing the Hackintosh thing. It came up again because
⏹️ ▶️ John someone did another blog post about it and as we’ve been talking about for weeks on the show about how
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically the wrong time to buy any Mac because they’re all woefully out of date with the exception of the 5k iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe and I guess the little MacBook I suppose because that’s fairly up to date but everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else is just has incredibly old hardware there’s been lots of snarky tweets about it involving the store I think someone
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco retweeted somebody saying used to be that you made a Hackintosh to get
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself a cheap Macintosh. Now you do a Hackintosh just so you can run Mac OS on hardware that
⏹️ ▶️ John is not insanely outdated. Like it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s not, it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John money saving move and it’s not even like I want to build this amazing beast of a box type of move.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s more like I just want to run my preferred operating system on hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that was made in the past year or two. Um, and so that’s Apple’s fault for letting
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff go by. But uh, every time someone builds one of these Hackintosh, people are amazed that you can essentially build
⏹️ ▶️ John PC which is what you know modern Macs are when you get down to brass tacks in terms of the
⏹️ ▶️ John components for an incredibly small amount of money so this was a $1,200 Hackintosh that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John trumps any computer you could buy from Apple at any price for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ John Particularly galling are things like how cheap the RAM can be. Now it’s not apples to apples
⏹️ ▶️ John but like oh well the Mac Pro has ECC RAM and that’s why it costs more money and all these other excuses for
⏹️ ▶️ John why the RAM is so much more expensive but I will cause we have tweeted just just before the show, Apple charges $1,300 for 64 gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John of DDR3 RAM for the Mac Pro. You can get 64 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM for $275.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that is $275 versus $1,300. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the same amount of RAM, just drop the ECC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Granted, it is ECC versus not, but that is, that does affect the price, but not that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s nonsensical. The price of the Mac Pro is crazy fancy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say though, with this particular case, this particular Hackintosh, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the Xeon, it is not using the server chipset, it is not using ECC RAM. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really an iMac, not a Mac Pro comparison here. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still a good comparison to make. However, this is not making a very cheap Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is making a very cheap iMac. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way faster than the Mac Pro though, in every measurable way. So it doesn’t really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t it literally the exact same CPU that’s sold in the 5K iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably I mean the before the 5k I’m like is faster than the Mac Pro like you know except for in massively parallel
⏹️ ▶️ John things where you got a 12 core blah blah blah but I mean this is a 1200 dollar computer like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agreed however it is it is an insult to the iMac not the Mac Pro. Yeah well it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s entire line and this particular hackintosh
⏹️ ▶️ John find a million different hackintosh builds you can build it that’s the whole point of hackintosh is you can build it any way you want and so a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people have been asking us whether we would ever do a hackintosh or whether
⏹️ ▶️ John this is something we’ve considered because we’ve been complaining so much about the outdated Apple hardware. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll speak for myself and say, I look at this and it makes me sad about Apple’s product line, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I had never really considered making one myself because I don’t want to have to deal with any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the stuff that Hackintoshes have to deal with. They have to deal with a lot of stuff because Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make an operating system for just sort of any sort of hardware. So they have to carefully match
⏹️ ▶️ John their hardware to what Apple provides drivers for or to what they can get drivers for. and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John become even harder with the driver signing thing and everything. Lots of features, lots of major features
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t work on the hackintoshes because they haven’t figured out how to convince the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system there to make hardware that is similar enough to Mac hardware that
⏹️ ▶️ John things will work in particular one that really stood out to me in this particular hack and such stories. They still haven’t gotten I message working.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s not like a minor feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s a big message.
⏹️ ▶️ John I message is a pretty like, would you like to use a Mac? But by By the way, you can’t use iMessage. And forget about all the modern
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that it requires, like handoff, continuity, or the Touch ID sensor that will appear on
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook someday. Forget about that stuff, because there’s no way they’re gonna be able to do that. They’re not gonna be able to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a secure enclave from Apple and stick it into their PC and get the stuff to work. So the amount of things that
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t work that make your Mac not really a Mac is a growing list of things. And Apple, not that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it to stop hack and dodges, but Apple keeps adding to that list. And I just, I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with any of that. I just want it to work. I don’t want to do a point update and have my machine not boot because the video drivers don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work anymore. I don’t want to have to worry about any of that stuff. I just want a really good, big, fast, and I’m willing to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John much more money for the privilege of someone figuring this all out ahead of time and making me, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a nice piece of hardware that works, and this is before I get into like how ugly these boxes are
⏹️ ▶️ John and how much noise they might make and all the other, and the fact that you have to build it yourself and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I would, I would sooner build myself a gaming PC than I would a hackintosh
⏹️ ▶️ John like gaming PC. I’ve come really close to building many times in my various states of frustration, but a hackintosh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh What I build what hell no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you and you built PCs before right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah For a long time basically up until the time I started using ThinkPads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exclusively, which was right before I started using MacBooks exclusively which was before I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started using the iMac, I was always building PCs. Always, always, always, always. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of all, I’m so far out of the game, so to speak, like I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Like I understand the components
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are necessary for a modern personal computer, but I don’t know what processors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are popular these days. I don’t know what memory is the right memory to choose. And obviously I could figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this out, but I just don’t have the patience, the time, or the energy for it. is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a thing, especially a computer where I only buy one once every like four to eight years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would much rather throw money at the problem and just have Apple fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it for me. That being said, the whole reason we’re talking about this is because Apple is doing a very good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job of avoiding taking our money. Well not us, maybe John, not Marco and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily, but I mean Apple’s really working hard at not updating things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except the MacBook Adorable and to some degree the iMac, like you guys said earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s the holdup? I don’t get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, there was a very long span in my life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I would gladly have built a Hackintosh. I was building my own PCs at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s just like building a PC with a little bit more hassle. But I agree with what Jon said that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the era of you have driver signing now, you have possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMessage hiccups with certain Hackintosh setups and handoff and stuff being tricky to get working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the various Wi-Fi chip hacks they do. It seems like we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty clearly moving towards a point in probably the near future where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hackintoshes won’t work anymore. Or at least enough features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t work on them that the trade-off between pain and the buttery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever you’re saving or gaining by having one, that might switch the other way. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Apple increases the pain and the buttery and the limitations and everything else, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not worth it anymore. Or at least for certain people it won’t be worth it anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just feel like in my current set of priorities, I’m able to trade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money for time to a certain degree. And when I was younger, like when I was in college and high school, building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these PCs for myself and my friends, we had nothing but time, but we had very little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money. So it made way more sense then to build our own PCs and deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the massive amounts of headaches and time sinks and crap that we had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deal with to build our own PCs and keep them running and keep them stable and keep them upgraded. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a massive time sink for me and my friends. But we did it because, again, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time-money continuum, the balance was different for us back then. Now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think all of us involved back then would all just buy a computer from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just be done with it and not have to worry about it because, quite frankly, we don’t have the time to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it and we do have a little bit of money to spend on them so we can do that instead. So it all depends on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s worth it to you. And as the environment shifts, whether it’s worth it will shift too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In this case, if Apple really does horribly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neglect the Mac line for longer, for a lot longer, then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will probably be tempted just to get more performance. In
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this particular case, I was disappointed to see that the high-end consumer desktop chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their platforms that are being used in this particular article, the Mike Rundle article, it’s the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same chip that’s available in the 5K iMac in the high-end configuration, the 4GHz Skylake i7.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was not a case of doing something that Apple won’t sell you, really. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was more of a case of just getting what Apple will sell you, but for way less money. That’s cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a huge market for that that I totally understand, but I don’t think the trade-off will be worth it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me in my current state of time versus money. What would be worth it possibly in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if Apple stops selling the Mac Pro and for some reason OS X keeps supporting its hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and then I can like I can get like an 8 or 12 or 16 core high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xeon workstation running Mac OS X and Apple won’t sell me one. That would be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting to me. But today it’s just not I don’t know it’s the balance for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t there today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think we’re gonna get MacBook Pro and not that this is unique But I think we’re gonna get MacBook Pro updates before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the end of the year And I think there’s a decent shot will get a stupid Mac Pro update before the end of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year I don’t think it’s dead based on no facts. Just a guess. I don’t think it’s dead But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should to go back to Hackintosh is specifically for a moment when I was debating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very publicly with you Marco whether or not I should get a Mac. This is 2008 ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe And we were having this debate via reblogs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of each other’s posts on Tumblr. What I ended up doing was taking my then ThinkPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey T30, I believe it was, and putting a Hackintosh version of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Leopard, I believe it was at the time, I might have that wrong, and running it for a few days just to see if I liked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, OS X. And to my recollection, Wi-Fi didn’t work, but onboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet did. And just about everything else did too. Maybe sound didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I don’t recall. But I remember vividly that Wi-Fi didn’t work, which was a major bummer. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really liked it and it was relatively pain-free to do. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I acquired some version of OS X that had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been prepared for this sort of use. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I used to install it. And it worked pretty darn well. And if it wasn’t for that, I probably still would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have bought the Mac anyway, but I felt a lot more confident in doing so. But just like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you hit the nail on the head. You know, today, the three of us can trade money for time, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will. And when we were in college and kids, when we were building computers, well, except John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had plenty of time to kill and not a lot of money. So it’s funny how things change.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just the time, too. It’s like thinking of your poor haunted iMac that could die at any second.
⏹️ ▶️ John paying for is someone to blame. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John If your computer goes wonky, you have someone to blame, and that’s Apple. If your computer continues to be wonky, continues to behave
⏹️ ▶️ John badly, you can keep bringing it back to Genius Bar, eventually replace it with an all-new computer. Not that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a fun thing to do, it’s still a pain in the butt, but if you build your own Hackintosh and it starts being wonky,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have no one to go to. You certainly can’t go to Apple, you can’t go to your motherboard manufacturer, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t go to your GPU vendor, you can’t go to the company that made the case, you can’t go to the monitor vendor, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve just got yourself. And so, Hackintoshes, I mean, they’re way cheaper, but they’re not free.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s, you know, that’s potentially 1000 or more dollars that you spent on something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it stops working, or starts being weird in some way, unless it is a hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John fault, like, oh, my GPU died, or my CPU died, like if it just starts being flaky, because again, it’s Hackintosh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s running, you know, an unsupported hardware configuration that you’re trying to hack to get to work. And by the way, it’s not like iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work at all. There are these strange incantations to try to get it to work by faking it out, but it’s very sketchy.
⏹️ ▶️ John If things start to act weird, you’ve got no one to blame. And that’s not tenable. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, maybe if you lived by yourself and you could handle your main computer
⏹️ ▶️ John not working or being flaky some of the time, maybe, or it was like a secondary computer, maybe you could handle that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in any sort of family environment where any other person is relying on that computer to
⏹️ ▶️ John be to be a computer to be able to sit down in front of it and like do your photos or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know like to do stuff on that computer and it doesn’t work and you’re the one who
⏹️ ▶️ John built this computer and you have no one to blame
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s at that
⏹️ ▶️ John point you will say I would love to be able to pay to have someone to blame for this other than
⏹️ ▶️ John me because you don’t want everyone looking at you and saying why does this computer that you wasted all this time
⏹️ ▶️ John on not work anymore and you’re like, you know, or why does it do this weird thing
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever? So I think of that just as much as like the time I would spend tinkering.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think of being having a single company who stands behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the supposed functionality of the entire thing. And I mean, the entire thing, like if if something, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if something is wonky about it, like if Wi-Fi works intermittently or whatever, I don’t have to prove
⏹️ ▶️ John that like the Wi-Fi, you know, chipset or whatever is bad and like
⏹️ ▶️ John go to that manufacturer and get them to replace it and plug it in and realize it’s a conflict between like the motherboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and this other, you know, like I don’t have to deal with any of that. I just I have to deal with a hassle. It’s still a hassle to go to the Apple store,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you’re lugging a big computer with you. You still have to probably go back three times, but eventually you’ll get some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of satisfaction, whereas if you built it yourself, at a certain point you’re just like sell the parts off
⏹️ ▶️ John individually and try again. It’s really grim.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean I’ve been, like I said, I built a good number of computers for myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my friends throughout high school and college and I’ve been in that position of like something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t work, especially if it’s not even on my computer. It usually wasn’t. Something doesn’t work on one of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends’ computers or worse on a computer that somebody paid me a little bit of money to build for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like there’s just it’s just an endless sinkhole of time and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my own money trying to, you know, resolve this problem and meanwhile dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very upset person who is very annoyed that this computer that they paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good amount of money to even though I didn’t get most of it but that they paid a good amount of money for all the parts and everything and I told them I could do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and then something goes wrong and I’m on the hook for it. It sucks and I gladly would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid to have like somebody else deal with it but at the time I didn’t have a lot of money that was the whole reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was doing this and there was nobody that I even could have paid to help out and it was horrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the flip side of this, Mike Rundle, Hackintosh here, the biggest feature for me is not the fact that it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John a cheaper iMac, is that he could pick any GPU that he wanted to put in there and he put in a better one that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iMac and he could have put an even better one there. In fact, he can change his mind two years later and get an even better GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s an option Apple doesn’t give you at all. Apple will give you that CPU that will not give you this GPU or
⏹️ ▶️ John the option to put in a better one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, this sounds impressive, but I agree that without iMessage on this Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no thanks. Hard pass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, it’s it’s it’s it’s this balance, right? Like, and I think what we’re all saying is, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we all would have reasons why we might want to build one of these things. If things got worse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the conditions change, like we might build Hackintosh is in three years or something. Who knows? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have no idea what you know what what what will will hold. But if your priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just very slightly different, or if your needs are just very slightly different from us, you could very easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall on the other side of that balance. And this could make total sense for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah, there’s a list of things that don’t work. Like AirDrop, I use a lot. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m the AirDrop unicorn because it almost always works for me. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have very good luck with AirDrop as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. His audio doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the first item, like you mentioned before, Casey, I think everything worked when I installed that bird except for Wi Fi. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And audio is like, what is this Linux? Minor features like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Wi Fi and audio don’t work. But otherwise, it’s perfect. Like audio doesn’t work. You have a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey non functional
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. It’s like saying my TV is great. It’s just there’s no sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. I genuinely had forgotten that audio maybe didn’t work. But yeah, looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this list, you know, audio doesn’t work community and handoff to continuity and handoff don’t work those I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use that much. I message doesn’t work. I’m out. AirDrop doesn’t work them out again. Well, I was already out with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio come to think of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John and touch ID doesn’t work like that’s going to be like, Apple just keeps accumulating these things. I think once people get
⏹️ ▶️ John used to unlocking their laptop with touch ID, a hackintosh is good. It’s like it’s like having a hackintosh with no
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi Fi. And you know, before Wi Fi was a big deal, just added on toilet seat iMacs or iBooks rather.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, well, you know, Wi Fi doesn’t work, but who uses that? And a certain point like Wi Fi doesn’t work. This is junk
⏹️ ▶️ John thrown away. Like I can’t a laptop without Wi Fi is pointless, right? I have touch ID and features like that
⏹️ ▶️ John will probably eventually feel like that. Like I’m not going to type in my password every time I unlock my computer. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John barbaric. And so and you can be pretty sure that it’s going to be very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to simulate the secure enclave touch ID hardware, whatever that Apple adds
⏹️ ▶️ John to their laptops, even if you can somehow source that part from the Far East and get it installed in
⏹️ ▶️ John your hackintosh. That’s that’s a hell of a challenge.
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Custom-built Macs
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⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of hackintoshes I was recalling from the olden days when you two probably weren’t born yet
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the original Hackintosh type things like in the early days of the Mac It was very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to clone it not the least of us because you needed the Mac ROM was a lot of most of the Mac toolbox
⏹️ ▶️ John was on on the ROM chip and that was proprietary Apple and you couldn’t really buy that part and so it’s very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to have any sort of legitimate commercial business selling Mac clones because you couldn’t have a Mac without that ROM
⏹️ ▶️ John and then on top of that all the other problems but there was one company that used to advertise in Mac magazines like
⏹️ ▶️ John a legitimate company I think they were in Australia maybe called outbound I’m trying to Google for a while
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to the last ad and my recollection is they would basically
⏹️ ▶️ John get around the cloning by buying actual real Apple stuff or requiring
⏹️ ▶️ John you to buy them or whatever and repackaging it. So they would take like a Mac Plus motherboard or a Mac SE motherboard and
⏹️ ▶️ John put it into kind of a laptop shape with a big battery and everything. So they were very, very expensive. You weren’t saving
⏹️ ▶️ John any money, but you could buy a basically real Macintosh, as
⏹️ ▶️ John far as the operating system was concerned, in a case not made by Apple, simply by adding a tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of cost. of like when you buy like a tuner car where you like just buy a basic Mustang and then
⏹️ ▶️ John add $100,000 right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You start on
⏹️ ▶️ John you start with the Mustang as delivered to you by Ford and then you just have lots of money. So you start with a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John SE or Mac plus and then they just take out the insides repackage them in a different thing and sell you the new thing and then
⏹️ ▶️ John add money on top of that. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like the, uh, the mod book people from a few years back, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, similar to that. But like, you know, going from a desktop computer to a laptop is quite a transition and
⏹️ ▶️ John they have the really weird pointing device that look like I don’t know if you guys ever saw this I don’t think I ever caught on because it’s pretty terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can imagine your space bar replaced by a pencil like you know a pencil horizontal pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John you put put your thumb on the pencil and as you roll the pencil you know just rolling it that makes your
⏹️ ▶️ John cursor go up and down and as you slide your finger left and right on the pencil that makes the cursor go left and right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what it was called
⏹️ ▶️ John it was not a good pointing device
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but it was it was an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco way say like
⏹️ ▶️ John before trackpads they wanted to have a pointing device that didn’t take up a lot of room so they didn’t have the
⏹️ ▶️ John nubbin at this point i think it predates the nubbin and they didn’t have a trackpad and there wasn’t room for that anyway so they had below
⏹️ ▶️ John the space bar this whatever this was like what is it called iso
⏹️ ▶️ John point track bar there you go i googling uh say i don’t know why it was called iso point anyway it didn’t catch
⏹️ ▶️ John on for a reason but uh yeah there’s a long history of people trying to essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John have a Mac but not have a Mac and I think everything has been tried including
⏹️ ▶️ John actual legitimate cloning which hopefully you guys either don’t remember or blocked out of your mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that was before our time as Mac users but I mean like all these things like these make sense you know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that crazy company was around when there wasn’t a Mac laptop the people who made mod book and everything that was before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad and there was no like there was no like Mac Cintiq basically is what they were trying to make and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know if they still make them anyway and and Hackintosh is are around because there’s no what everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calls the X Mac, which is like there’s basically no like cheap desktop tower Mac that just expandable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with regular slots. Like the Mac Pro used to kind of almost be that except it wasn’t cheap and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we don’t even have that anymore. So you know the and so Hackintoshes and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things they serve needs that Apple refuses to serve for whatever reason whether they’re not profitable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they’re just too specialized and they’re not enough people would buy them or whether they don’t fit into Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ives magic white room because they have too many ports and they’re too expandable and they’re too useful. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. But Apple refused to serve these markets. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get served somehow. Either they’re going to get served by crappy PCs with other stuff or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to get served with illegal pirated copies of OS X. I’m not really sure which is worse for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, but I’m guessing keeping people in the Apple ecosystem even illegally is probably better for Apple long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s an interesting point.
Apple hates the Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, this is all gonna get resolved this fall when they release all the new hardware and and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone will be happy except you two
⏹️ ▶️ John And Mac mini owners will also be set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, you know, we we at least talk from this position of privilege that like Apple at least occasionally mentions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our computers But Mac mini people who they they’re in a bad spot Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people like, you know, we’re complaining like all our computers haven’t gotten updated in like two or three years Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini people that’s always their condition like that since the beginning of the Mac mini it like the way they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treat the Mac Mini is just insulting. It really is insulting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the last time they updated it, they took away all the best options and all the expandability. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, oh, we have it easy compared to the Mac Mini people.
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw someone at work the other day considering idly like, I’m thinking of getting a new Mac and I can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John decide between a 5K iMac and a Mac Mini. And it dawned on me that for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, once again, dawned on me, you have to be shown it, that regular people don’t keep track of what the hell’s inside all the different
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. As far as they’re concerned, it’s like going to a car dealership. Well, you know, we make an SUV, we make a coupe, we make a sedan,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t go to think like, wait, does the sedan have like a steam powered
⏹️ ▶️ John engine in it? And the coupe has an internal combustion engine and I’m not aware of that? Like, as
⏹️ ▶️ John far as you’re concerned, well, it was really just like, you know, you don’t want to buy an all in one computer and have the big expensive screen trapped
⏹️ ▶️ John inside of there, which is all legitimate reasons for like, but what you don’t understand is that the 5k iMac has a sky like CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Mac Mini has like a core to duo or whatever the hell is in that thing now. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, look on the outside, it looks like you’re just you know, trading off like form factor and price and everything. But really,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should not buy that Mac Mini like ever just when it was new, you shouldn’t have bought it. And now you definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t buy it. And I don’t think Apple salespeople are going to emphasize that in the store, although
⏹️ ▶️ John they may be confused about wait, You want a Mac what? Are you sure you don’t want a MacBook? What are you saying? Mini?
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to call someone from the back. Do we have something called a Mac Mini? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, at least the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John probably next to the big TV, and they might have seen it. Oh, you mean that? That’s a computer? All right. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s the worst part of this, is that regular people shouldn’t have to care
⏹️ ▶️ John about this. They should have a reasonable expectation that they can go into an Apple store and sort of pick a computer based on
⏹️ ▶️ John how big they want it to be and how much they want it to cost and have some basic understanding of like, well, the more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John ones are better and faster and fancier than less expensive ones, but not to have this massive gulf
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, I think I’m deciding between, do I wanna have an integrated screen and an external screen? It’s like, no, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John tremendous trade-offs between the 5K iMac and the Mac mini that you really need to grasp before you make this decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as if they are just equivalent, but just the boxes are separate or together. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault. Yeah, I mean, you can kinda see like throughout the course of Apple’s history,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially recent history, there are certain products that they keep around like out of spite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I don’t know it’s like certain products that they not maybe if I maybe if I throw in word but like certain products where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they kind of begrudgingly keep them around and you can tell they really don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and it’s almost like this it’s this tense relationship they seem to have these products of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like disdain and they just kind of you know crap out updates every so often because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to and you know it’s the same way that Steve Jobs famously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demoing the Motorola Rocker phone, and you could tell he just hated this device, and he was trying to put on a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face on stage, but he just hated it. To me, that is how Apple treats the Mac Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possibly, maybe even the Mac Pro these days. I don’t know, time will tell on that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the Mac Mini, certainly, that is how they’ve treated it for a long time, where they keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it updated because, for whatever strategic reason or whatever, They kind of have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep offering this computer, which solves a bunch of needs, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they hate it so much, and they never let you forget they hate it. Every update, they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna give a little here, but then we’re gonna take away this other thing, and we’re just gonna make you hate this until you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fools all stop buying it, and you switch to one of our better computers. Like, that is honestly the feeling I get about the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini, and I own one, and even when I bought it, I was mad about it, and I still bought it because I needed one, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was pricing it, and I’m like, God, this thing is such a rip off and so restricted. And so it’s like, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ah, it’s so, I felt all that anger that Apple clearly has for this product that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate and they occasionally sell.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder what the pressures are on the Mac mini design. Like, is it like that every year the margins have to get better? Cause that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that fits the data we have kind of like, that it does get more expensive and crappier.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like relatively speaking, obviously it gets better when they, you know, with the exception of this recent quad to dual core transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the most part, it does get better, but like it seems to me that the margins get better with every new version. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they’ve kind of given up on, hey, we need to find a way to boost the sales of the Mac mini because the
⏹️ ▶️ John sales are probably extremely low and not really going anywhere. But they said, but every year we can boost the margins by
⏹️ ▶️ John putting slightly cheaper stuff in it and removing the optical drive and, you know, doing all the stuff that we can
⏹️ ▶️ John do to, you know, like every group, like you have to be measured on something. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know Apple famously does has just a profit and loss line for the entire company and is not measuring every individual
⏹️ ▶️ John department saying well Mac Mini team what is your profit and loss for the year or whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John the products are changed with some kind of purpose and increasing or at the very least
⏹️ ▶️ John maintaining margins seems to be a big Apple incentive and I look at what they’re doing with the Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ John what explanation for the evolution of that a hardware and that product is there other
⏹️ ▶️ John than pressure to increase or maintain margins with each new revision and
⏹️ ▶️ John not a a lot of pressure to do anything with it until it’s in desperate need of replacement because it
⏹️ ▶️ John like it has never been a great bargain. But I feel like the value proposition has just gotten worse and worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re getting less for more money. Yeah. And you know, like you said, Marco, you know, if you need a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little headless Mac, this is your only option. And maybe that’s maybe that’s just good business. Maybe Apple knows, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if people need a tiny little headless Mac, this is their only option. So just add like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a little tiny bit extra every year. Can we add, you know, take out 10 or 20 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John worth of hardware and add 50 bucks to the price and do that every three years for the next nine years and pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John soon you have an $800 computer that’s as fast as a pocket calculator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What did you buy your Mac Mini for? It’s my iSCSI host and it runs Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to back up my Synology and it’s currently doing this live stream. That’s great. It’s also where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put utility software that I don’t want junking up my main Mac. So the iScosy driver was one of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also use it as the Fujitsu ScanSnap software machine. It runs the ScanSnap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. The ScanSnap scans to it, and then it just syncs things over via network sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my real computer. So it does this utility, this set of utility functions. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a home server in certain ways, but not always. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m always looking for possible plans of how I can rearrange my home setup so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need it anymore. But it is still in use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The correct answer to my question was a continuous integration server, but who am I kidding?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is WDDC sessions about the testing bots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it’s one of those things where when I see the session about it at WDC, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sounds really cool, but it also looks and sounds like it requires a lot of setup of testing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infrastructure that I don’t probably want to set up. So someday that will sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really awesome to me. Someday when I have a staff of responsible programmers working for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can set that up and I will just enjoy the benefits of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going to start small. We’re starting with unit tests. We’re not going to go all the way to continuous integration server.
⏹️ ▶️ John For a single person shop, you probably don’t need that, although Underscore probably has five of them. Continuously
⏹️ ▶️ John building his software and running tests against them and he has a little dashboard that sends him a message on his watch that tells
⏹️ ▶️ John him the state of all his applications as of the latest beta of the software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now he’s really good at using time so he probably didn’t set that up.
⏹️ ▶️ John No he did because now his applications write
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco themselves. I didn’t think he writes all his apps. He just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, new betas of the OS come out, his little minions automatically download it, rebuild his software for
⏹️ ▶️ John it, click all the fix it things in Xcode to fix all the problems that it finds, and then he has
⏹️ ▶️ John a little dashboard display on his watch while he’s out for his evening constitutional that tells him how many of his apps
⏹️ ▶️ John have successfully upgraded for iOS 10 beta 2. And you know, one of them has one warning left and he’s going to go and
⏹️ ▶️ John sit down his computer, click one button, he’ll fix that one. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a picture of his life. Don’t don’t tell me if it’s any different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s accurate. I’ve seen his setup. It’s accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week. Eero, Wonder Capital and Trunk Club. and we will see
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s So that’s Casey Liss, M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey N-t Marco Armin, s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental They didn’t mean to, accidental, tech podcasts so long.
Post-show Neutral: Accord SE
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so you tell me about your potential new accord John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the family’s potential new accord Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean it makes sense like Mike has two iPads, right? I think he has 13. That’s right So, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have two accords.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. No, I don’t have any problem with that My wife’s car is about 10 years old and it’s usually when we start thinking about replacing
⏹️ ▶️ John them and it’s pretty beat up And she was thinking about what kind of car should she get and she faces
⏹️ ▶️ John the same problems They kind of you were talking about Casey. She doesn’t want an automatic transmission Her options
⏹️ ▶️ John are really limited. We also don’t want to spend a tremendous amount of money for
⏹️ ▶️ John the car for a variety of reasons. I mean, we know what’s, just look at her old car and just think of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to buy a $60,000 car and it’s going to look like that for 10 years, you’re going to be sad. So we need,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, it needs to be reliable, big, be able to fit four people in it and all of our stuff, all that, you know, and we basically end up
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the same place we always end up, which is like the Mazda six or the Honda Accord. Those are the reasonably priced,
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable, four-door, sporty sedans you can get with a stick shift. And
⏹️ ▶️ John she resisted that for a while, started coming around a little bit when she was looking at the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Accord, started doing like the little builder thingy to build your own car, and I think what’s pushing her over
⏹️ ▶️ John the edge is the fact that they have, once again, the same thing that they
⏹️ ▶️ John had when she got her current car. Her current car, she had a… I always get the model years wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John because I mess up with the calendar years, but a 2003 or four ish
⏹️ ▶️ John accord, they got totaled. And with we got a pretty good amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of money back from that. Basically, with the money from that car being told plus a little bit extra, we bought a 2006 ish accord.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at that point, it was the end of the generation, like the end of that. You know that before they replaced it with a super ugly
⏹️ ▶️ John one that I never bought and never considered buying because it was terrible. That
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. Yeah, that was like the worst accord in a long time. Anyway, it was the end of the generation and I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess they do this regularly I don’t know this I’ve only been buying Accords for you know, ten years or so, so I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John They make a special edition right at the end of the product line so that for 2017 The
⏹️ ▶️ John Honda Accord Sport comes in a special edition Which is just the Honda Accord Sport which by the way the sport is
⏹️ ▶️ John you know We get this part because it has a stick shift You can get the stick shift in the LX But the sport has like nicer wheels and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John But any of the cars for the six shift you can’t get a lot of the nice options So a lot of the fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that’s in the v6 or in the high-end ones You just can’t get with a stick shift, which is a shame So we’re kind of like limiting ourselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the sport special edition is still limited like the sport But has a few extra niceties
⏹️ ▶️ John So it comes with leather seats and heat Seat heaters which she’s wanted for a long time and we haven’t been
⏹️ ▶️ John able to get because for the most part 4-door stick shift sedans do not come with leather seats or seat heaters unless they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John BMWs like, you know cheap car So finally here is a car down in our price range
⏹️ ▶️ John with these fancy options in it And it comes with a nice fancy wheels and all the little
⏹️ ▶️ John body treatments and all the other stuff that you want your Accord sport to come with and Contrasting
⏹️ ▶️ John red stitching and a little ball shifter thing and all sorts of nice things They’re still doesn’t come with navigation.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think you still can’t get that and the second thing that I think is attracting her to it is
⏹️ ▶️ John For the most part the Accord sport comes in super boring color. I can get black white and gray I think those are the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when I bought my car.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it You know Honda is not particularly magnanimous with the color choices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not true I’m looking at red right here the sport special edition red right
⏹️ ▶️ John well So now red is an option both
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in 2016 red is an option and in the 2017 special
⏹️ ▶️ John edition So she wants to get a red Honda Accord Sport special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these wheels are aggressive. I Like them, but they’re aggressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I have them anyway So this is probably the car she’s going to get and I think what is making her go
⏹️ ▶️ John over is the seat heaters and the leather Which I don’t think she’s gonna be that big of a fan of leather. I like cloth seats personally,
⏹️ ▶️ John but seat heaters I think she will enjoy a lot and The fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that she’s gonna get it in red. So she’s got she’s bitten by the Marco red bug She’s at that stage in life where she wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a red car I would never buy this guy would buy this in black immediately and but she can’t tolerate having two black Accords even
⏹️ ▶️ John though I could even though they would look as different as two of my children to me to her
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s exactly the same. Like, so 2017 and 2014 they’re totally different. The
⏹️ ▶️ John wheels alone how can you not tell? Like would I ever mistakenly get in the wrong car?
⏹️ ▶️ John It would never happen but to her she cannot have two black Accords which is fine. It’s her car she can
⏹️ ▶️ John pick whatever color she wants and really her only options are white, black, gray and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco In other words black and red is what we’re gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John getting. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t mind that. I like the silver. The gray is really dark, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the silver, I think Accord does look good in silver, but silver is not an option for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So will this be better than your car?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, yeah. I mean, like, obviously, seat heaters is going to make it better, and leather technically is better, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I think I like cloth better. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mean, it looks to me like it’s better than your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car in almost every way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And how do you feel about
⏹️ ▶️ John that? It’s the same engine and transmission. And like I said, I don’t think the
⏹️ ▶️ John leather seats are actually an improvement, especially, you know, I know the heaters are going to make them warm up in the wintertime,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is cold initially unless you let the seats warm up before you get into the car. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t really like sitting on leather. I’d rather sit on cloth.
⏹️ ▶️ John But everything else about it’s not faster, doesn’t have a more powerful engine. I’m kind of jealous of her wheels
⏹️ ▶️ John because like Casey said, they are more aggressive and I feel like I should have the more aggressive wheels, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be fine. Like I’m happy for her to have this car if she likes it then that’s all I care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will continue to try to defend my car even as my children scrape their bicycles against the side of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why not a Zoom Zoom?
⏹️ ▶️ John She doesn’t seem that interested in that and honestly I am still a little bit wary of Mazda reliability.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re such a small company compared to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car so far has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John indestructible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, they’re good. We had a Mazda when I was a kid. fairly reliable, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a little bit wary of that. I would still go with it if that’s what she wanted. I think the Saccord looks better than the 6.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, we’ve just always been a Honda family. It seems silly to break the streak at this point. And the other practical
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is- That’s a good reason to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, it seems silly to pick a
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Yeah, well, I mean, we’ve been satisfied with Honda. Like, you know, it’s like going to the restaurant that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know you like rather than trying a different one. And the more practical reason is we I’d like to
⏹️ ▶️ John get across to the dealer which whatever it may be silly, but again, it’s exchanging money for a peace
⏹️ ▶️ John of mind or someone to blame or whatever And it’s a lot easier to get to Honda dealerships from our house than it is
⏹️ ▶️ John to Mazda dealerships
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever works I was gonna ask you something shoot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh Somebody pointed out in the chat the same thing. I was thinking, you know I have no issue quite obviously with her getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a six-speed but But if she had gotten an automatic, I think that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let her get a remote start. And in the barbaric conditions in which you live, that would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be really nice, unless you would forego the garage and give her the garage spot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw the remote start as an option in the little car builder thing. I didn’t realize it probably had to be associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with the automatic. But it’s not actually an automatic. The CVT is the other option. The car is so messed up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are your options in Honda these days. You understand why I’m being chased down into this one little corner
⏹️ ▶️ John of Honda’s car line up and eventually like Casey, you know, I will be in a situation where this goes away. But in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to keep buying these. I really like my car. It’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the best car I’ve owned, possible exception of the 1992 Civic, which I really
⏹️ ▶️ John liked, but was a deathtrap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you keep sticking with Honda. Let me know how that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Minor issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they are good cars. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John does look good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every car was a deathtrap in 1992.
⏹️ ▶️ John on, like it was a tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco economy car. We
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have the technology to do this. But the Accord is this generation of Accord is a great
⏹️ ▶️ John generation. I don’t know what the next generation will be like of Accords. If you’re thinking of getting a Accord, and this is the last model year, and they’re going to switch
⏹️ ▶️ John it over in 2018, get this car. Get a 2016, get a 2017. The whole model line is just great. God, I’m building my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sedan, sport special edition, six-speed manual.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the entire model name. Anyway, you’re right. The exterior colors, black,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steel, which is gray, San Marino red or white white orchid pearl
⏹️ ▶️ Casey white are your options your interior color, your choices are as follows. Black leather,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have three choices of wheels, a bunch of really crappy exterior accessories, a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of equally crappy interior accessories. And then electronic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait a second. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John are most there but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re right. How can that be associated with the manual? How does that even work? Can’t be?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, maybe if neutral yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is not a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of people do that I agree with you it’s barbaric
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do that you have to remote start as your car lurch forward and slam
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey into your garage wall yes seriously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how can that be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John doesn’t make it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably just their website not realizing oh you can’t you can’t have that one unless you have the CVT yep that’s probably and
⏹️ ▶️ John those those stupid plastic accessories that you see the exterior accessories people buy those I see them on the road
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. Like, A, look at the prices, and B, look at what they look like. Some of them I think actually do look kind of cool, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey usually… Oh, the body side molding looks good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But usually people don’t buy just one, they buy like all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John just look at the prices, look at how much money they’re paying. Yeah. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey understand it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bring all this up to say that it is frustrating not only how cheap this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car is as compared to the sorts of cars that I am often pricing, which again, I didn’t buy my BMW new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that very reason, but there are so few actual options. Like, these are are just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do you say to accoutrement or whatever these are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just dealer installed crap right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly but with BMW they nickel and dime you over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything it is absurd how bad they nickel and dime over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think you even get leather for free
⏹️ ▶️ John Honda just added the floor mats like a couple years ago I believe like so
⏹️ ▶️ John I for the first half of my Honda buying yet to buy a pay 150 bucks of the format they I finally added that
⏹️ ▶️ John in. So that’s a nice break from the norm. But it’s frustrating how few options are, because again, we would
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for navigation. We would pay whatever obscene price for navigation, and it goes, that’s what my wife wants. She wants,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though we all know it’s better on the phone and all this other stuff, she just wants to have a car with navigation to see what it’s like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, having it built in is awesome. I will tolerate, like, even Tesla’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system is okay, but it’s not great. But I still use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of using my phone because it’s built in and having it built in is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I completely agree. And my maps are, well, I actually happen to have a BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey repair bill because that’s what BMWs do is they generate repair bills. I have one in front of me which includes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the delivery date which was December of 2010. So I have maps from 2010 and every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single time I get in the car and I don’t know where I’m going, I will spend the time to plug it into the navigation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it is so much more convenient and safe to look at the screen that’s designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that sort of thing than it is to be fumbling with my phone. And I could not agree more. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an ancient car like mine is becoming, I would still rather have the onboard nav. So Tina is right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ask for it. I completely agree
⏹️ ▶️ John with her. But again, not an option. Because this is basically the bottom of the line Honda, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the special edition. And I’m wondering what other special edition things are. Her special edition had the
⏹️ ▶️ John faux carbon fiber trim. That was the special edition. Her wheels, like the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John distinguish her current Accord as a special edition are from the outside is the wheels and if you look inside,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fake carbon fiber that replaces like the trim bits. And that’s basically it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who, we got such a good deal on her car, the people who ordered this car before us and then
⏹️ ▶️ John backed out did add a couple of external bolt-on dealer accessories
⏹️ ▶️ John that I just had to like stomach, you know, like, you know, cause you can’t really remove them cause now there’s like holes in the
⏹️ ▶️ John bodywork of where they mount them or whatever. So I had to just accept those. I don’t particularly like them, I would never have bought
⏹️ ▶️ John them myself, but this car was so cheap. We got such a good deal on this car. I assume we’re not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John get that great of a deal on this 2017. The other 2017 thing I’m looking forward to is supposedly they
⏹️ ▶️ John made their infotainment system software better, and there’s a lot of room
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to get better because it is so slow and so clunky and so Byzantine. It
⏹️ ▶️ John took me like six months to learn how to do the most basic things on it and it still drives me nuts. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m happy for them to have, you know, they advertise it as, you know, being
⏹️ ▶️ John more responsive. Like, please, anything, anything, any improvement to that area that you can give me,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will accept. I’m sure they probably also made some other things worse. So anyway, I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hopeful, vaguely hopeful about this car. But yeah, I’m slowly being chased out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the car market by stick shifts disappearing. I’m being chased out of Hondas by Honda
⏹️ ▶️ John replacing all their transmissions with CVTs. Hopefully by the time I’m really chased out of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, all the CVTs will have morphed into automated manual dual clutch transmissions
⏹️ ▶️ John and that maybe I’ll be able to tolerate more than the horror that is the CVT.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DCT is livable. If my future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is not an electric car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a six-speed I will go out of my way to find a true DCT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they it is not the way I would prefer it but it is certainly livable. Does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this model year support CarPlay because you get the big screen even if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get like a GPS chip so to speak right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not a touchscreen it’s just a display screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay can use wheels and stuff too. Right, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s no well. There’s kind of a wheel. It’s not it
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the like the BMW system where you have a cursor control. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John that It’s more like a series of buttons and sometimes sometimes the wheel scrolls, but that’s it I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean even like a d-pad kind of thing like I’m pretty sure carplay worked with all sorts of combination of these of these control Schemes, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John Honda does support carplay, so maybe it works, but really it’s not even a d-pad It’s not even a five-way thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is literally a cluster of buttons one called menu one called back And then there’s a button
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a wheel and the only thing the wheel does is move the selection up and down But you’re mostly hitting menu back and settings
⏹️ ▶️ John To try to navigate and display it because some navigation options are not available as particular thing is displayed So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a terrible interface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah when Marco and I and a couple of friends of ours went to Cupertino and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Facebook when we were out in California We rented a Mercedes GL 45, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey truly lovely SUV. Like, it’s certainly not my kind of car, not the sort of thing I would want to drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But darned if it wasn’t really nice. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iDrive has its problems. It’s very opinionated. And it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit weird, although I’ve come to absolutely love it. And iDrive is a BMW system. iDrive is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, whatever they call the Mercedes system, It is unbelievably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad. This was, I would assume this was like a $90,000 truck or something like that, or whatever it was, it was expensive. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not 90,000, but it was expensive and it was beautiful in so many ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this infotainment system was awful. Just unbelievably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. I’m guessing they probably just didn’t give it a name out of mercy. That
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s called command all caps. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They love names.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just I can’t handle it was so unbelievably bad just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah there was there was a time I about a year ago I rented I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was at a car rental place for on a trip and I had to rent a four-door sedan and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a Mercedes E something or other that was available for a little bit more I’m like okay sure I’ll do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was a great pleasure to drive that car in many many ways, but it had the same system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my god, like it’s like using DOS. It’s like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year is this and how expensive is this car and you have this system in here?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impressively bad. So if you go to automobiles.honda.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash Accord hyphen sedan and if you scroll down…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how did I get here? Of course you can’t link to anything on this stupid page. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scroll down, there’s eventually a section where it says cockpit convenience or accessories. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you click accessories, then there’s a button for Apple CarPlay where it says it is standard on EX,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EXL, EXL V6 and touring models, which I assume is not the sport model,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which means no guts.
⏹️ ▶️ John stick. Yeah, I mean, like you can get the stick in the LX and we looked at that, like you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-sport one and you get a few different options but you get worse looking wheels than for me
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the deal breaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and EXL V6 and Touring those are your only options.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah the LX is the bottom of the bottom of the line. They got rid of DX that’s kind of a clever thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John Honda did in its naming. It used to have a letter system for like the trim
⏹️ ▶️ John levels right and DX was always the bottom like our Civic was a DX is why it only had one side mirror on it
⏹️ ▶️ John believe that was legal for a long time. Yeah, this is very tiny car I think they basically
⏹️ ▶️ John retired the DX moniker because it became such a like, you know an anti-status
⏹️ ▶️ John symbol like oh You got the super cheap one, right? And so now the bottom is just like all I did was shift letters like the LX
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically the DX It’s the same thing like, you know, no body colored side mirrors is they don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John one mirror anymore, but it’s uh, it’s really cheap But yeah, the sport is a step up from
⏹️ ▶️ John the LX So even though you can get the LX, it’s frustrating because you can get the LX with a stick
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can get more options, a few more options on the LX even though it is supposedly the lesser model because the sport
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, oh, you don’t want those things. You want everything just to be sporty. It’s like, no, well, you know, I would have taken the seat heaters
⏹️ ▶️ John in my car if they were an option but they weren’t an option.